Jonathan Freedland comments:

Putin still has friends in the west – and they’re gaining ground (The Guardian; Apr 8, 2022)

Comparatively, there's a good deal more public self-criticism and soul-searching in the US than in Russia. A problem in the US is that it's kind of drowning, everything from all kinds of crud to intellectuals like Chomsky. In Putin's Russia, much like in China, they're oppressed (including heavy-handedly), whether covertly by (scared-offended) oligarchs or Putin or whoever. At least in the US, like in various European countries and Downunder and other places, people can launch scathing societal/political critiques. Russia's propaganda machine has the easier job, and a bit of help.

(There are people in Freedland's article I'd have problems getting along with.)

Putin denies Ukraine's self-determination (something that's part of UN's Charter in line with the human rights declaration). Rationale has been given, but activities, and lack thereof, seem to suggest other objectives?

Taking out all of them is not justice, revenge, or some blood lust, but simply that such depraved people in such a massive destructive force cannot be allowed to exist as a risk. — Christoffer

Everyone has a right to exist.

How is Freedland's article not hysterical propaganda.

with the rocket attack on Kramatorsk only the latest evidence

War is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means.

Karl Von Clausewitz

I have a saying:

media reports are simply war by other means.

Given that our world is primarily image-driven, it is natural to find this influence permeating the mass media complex, which would include advertising, news, print, radio, television, plays, film, graphic novels, and so on. The old military psychological warfare tactics have thus been combined with the advertising and media propaganda studies to create a massive complex that, in my estimation, is well intertwined.

https://jaysanalysis.com/2011/05/18/psychological-warfare-and-media/

This time it is psychological warfare, I guess it is time to fight back.

Mar 7, 2022 · Russian Orthodox Church Leader Blames Invasion on Ukraine's 'Gay Pride' (Newsweek) — jorndoe

I think it is called a right to opinion, that is one thing, but some of his remarks seem not very far off the mark.

The church leader characterized pride parades as "loyalty tests," and said that countries looking to ally with Western powers must embrace them or be shunned

Ultimately, Kirill called the invasion of Ukraine a conflict about things "far more important than politics," and insinuated that the embrace of progressive western values would lead to the end of civilization.

I think he is laughably behind the times: civilization ended a long time ago. I have no problem with an expression of opinion, in fact, I welcome it. All dialog starts with a peaceful expression of opinion, going to war is a choice for which we have identified the sole persons responsible.

Meanwhile the Pope weighs in:

"In Ukraine, rivers of blood and tears are flowing," the Pope said on Sunday while addressing followers in St. Peter's Square. "This is not just a military operation but a war which sows death, destruction and misery."

If anyone can find a similar statement from His Holiness the Pope on the other parts of the world where the same rivers are flowing, please post it here.

Vatican City, (CNA/EWTN News) - Praying a 'Hail Mary' for the people of Yemen, the pope urged people Feb. 3 to "pray hard, because there are children who are hungry, who are thirsty, who have no medicine, and are in danger of death," adding that "we take this thought home with us."

https://www.catholic.org/news/international/europe/story.php?id=80073

Francis was greeted by Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who escorted him to meet Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Egypt's Al-Azhar mosque and university, one of the main seats of learning of Sunni Islam. The pontiff embraced him. Both men will hold meetings with Pope Francis on Monday. The UAE plays a leading role in the Saudi-led coalition battling the Houthis in Yemen.

https://news.yahoo.com/pope-condemns-yemen-war-ahead-historic-gulf-visit-135826385.html


Now all he has to do is travel to Moscow and embrace President Putin.

ROME — While people can be indifferent to wars in distant lands, they cannot afford to look the other way when war is at their doorstep, Pope Francis said.

https://news.diocesetucson.org/news/war-is-at-our-doorstep-pope

The Pope called for more international dialogue in order to put an end to the conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and other regions of the world

https://www.eg24.news/2021/12/pope-francis-syria-and-yemen-are-forgotten-tremendous-tragedies.html

Dialog and weapons - how about missiles for the Yemeni whatever faction?

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/04/ukraine-russia-putin-azov-neo-nazis-western-media/

A nice accounting of how Western media and analysis went from "we need to be really careful about Nazis in Ukraine" to "what Nazis nothing to see here haha Putin propaganda", right after the advent of war:

Before this war, Western media coverage presented a Ukrainian far right that was uniquely well-organized, well-connected to both the Ukrainian state and private benefactors, increasingly emboldened, violent, and threatening to democracy, and on the march in terms of its influence. Suddenly, this same media is now telling us all of this is simply lies and Russian propaganda, in line with the favored talking point of the neo-Nazis themselves. Calling this “Orwellian” doesn’t do it justice.

...Before the war, the German government–funded Counter Extremism Project had warned that Ukraine’s paramilitary training infrastructure “presents the risk that violence-oriented right-wing extremist and terrorist individuals from abroad obtain weapons and explosives training in Ukraine,” potentially “increas[ing] the effectiveness of the violence that these individuals may perpetrate in their home countries.” Yet despite years of media fixation on the threat of far-right terrorism — a threat that’s still relatively small at this stage but has the potential to get much worse — this concern, when it’s not dismissed as a Kremlin talking point, goes almost entirely undiscussed in the Western press, even as thousands of foreign fighters, some of them homegrown extremists, stream into the country.

There are serious risks for Ukraine, too. A Western public uninformed about the dangers of the far right is watching its governments, with no debate, send an avalanche of weaponry into the country, where it will fall (and some has already fallen) into the hands of extremists — the same extremists who have serially attacked vulnerable groups, want to institute a dictatorship, have repeatedly threatened and carried out violence against the government, and have already helped overthrow one president. With Zelensky now envisioning a postwar Ukrainian society with more armed people in the streets, and members of the military and National Guard — both institutions where extremists have made a home — patrolling everyday locations, this risk is all the bigger.

Putin’s war on Ukraine has, ironically, been a boon to its far right, which has been further legitimized, better equipped, and supplied with volunteers as a result of his attack. Tragically, the Western press is now also assisting this process, unwittingly advancing extremists’ preferred talking points. We don’t have to pretend there’s no far right problem in Ukraine to give the country our support and solidarity. But by rewriting history and doing PR for literal Nazis, we may be sleepwalking into more disaster.

Maybe in the quest for righteous rooting out of Russian propaganda people here should not find themselves running cover for Nazis.

ThErE iS No ProPaGanDa In ThE WeSt - Every clown ever

The evening news programs of the three dominant U.S. television networks devoted more coverage to the war in Ukraine last month than in any other month during all wars, including those in which the U.S. military was directly engaged, since the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq, according to the authoritative Tyndall Report. The only exception was the last war in which U.S. forces participated in Europe, the 1999 Kosovo campaign.

Combined, the three networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — devoted 562 minutes to the first full month of the war in Ukraine. That was more time than in the first month of the U.S. invasion of Panama in December 1989 (240 mins), its intervention in Somalia in 1992 (423 mins), and even the first month of its invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001 (306 minutes), according to a commentary published Thursday by Andrew Tyndall, who has monitored and coded the three networks’ nightly news each weekday since 1988.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/04/08/networks-covered-the-war-in-ukraine-more-than-the-us-invasion-of-iraq/

I have posted the BBC's news items on the neo- Nazis, the big question is why the change in strategy, and even more worrying is the possibility that "The people we govern cannot think" as Adolf Hitler said, maybe people cannot even remember? A planet run by emotions seems to be a recipe for disasters. It would make a great Sci-Fi Novel.

Very good, so what effect is this having on you, dear viewer, and citizen, hows the brainprogramming going so far?

The more powerful the government, the bigger and more brazen, and more obvious the lies.

- I said that.

God, history really does rhyme with itself doesn't it. Just... ridiculous uncanniness:

The way NATO was waging its war was clearly not aimed at helping the Kosovars [in Yugoslavia] ,but using their plight as a pretext; similarly, Milosevic’s accelerated war against the Kosovars, while using NATO’s attack as a pretext, obviously had nothing to do with defending Serbia from NATO. Nevertheless, a prominent section of the left supported NATO’s war [against Yugoslavia]. As the war became more and more destructive and obviously counterproductive, it was difficult to withdraw support: if you had concluded that NATO was finally acting on behalf of the oppressed, even if unwittingly, you could only insist it finish the job.

Leftists like Ken Livingstone hence found themselves on the same platform as the likes of Margaret Thatcher. Of course, that may happen in peculiar instances. Yet to be allied to a warmongering section of Western imperialism on the issue of war must surely be a worry. NATO was not being dragged in and reluctantly carrying out actions that helped the oppressed. On the contrary, once it decided on war, it launched it with all the destructiveness and callous disregard for civilian life that it usually displays, while assiduously not helping the oppressed Kosovars.

... Regimes which are the greatest violators of human rights have always been useful for enforcing the ruthless exploitation of labour. There was no fundamental Western interest in intervening in Yugoslavia just because of aggression and human rights violations. There were plenty of examples of non-intervention when it was simply a humanitarian concern (Rwanda 1994). This was even the case with Iraq when it was gassing Kurds, rather than occupying the Western protectorate of Kuwait. From this one can understand that if the West does use “human rights” to justify a war against a tyrannical regime, it must really have some other interests in mind.

The support for NATO by a section of the left in 1999 had its mirror image in a very prominent section of the left which decided instead that, since an imperialist bloc like NATO was attacking Milosevic’s Serbia, the latter must be doing something right. The aim of this section of the left was to play down the crimes of Milosevic. In the most extreme cases, this meant pretending, that ethnic cleansing was not taking place and that the Kosovar refugees were “fleeing NATO bombs”.

....A number of left-oriented writers [demonstrated] the large-scale Western economic intervention into Yugoslavia, particularly through the free market radicalism imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the dramatic effects of which played a role in driving people to nationalism ... The dictates of the IMF and World Bank played the decisive role in shaping the Western policy of insisting on Yugoslav centralism, undermining traditional republican privileges. Some impressive works— Susan Woodward’s Balkan Tragedy and Branka Magas’ The Destruction of Yugoslavia — have documented this extensive relationship, correctly situating the rise of Milosevic in this context.

It's like this stuff follows a script.

Via Mike Karadjis, Bosnia, Kosova, & the West.

Edmund Adam writes:

Analysis: Ukraine war: The history of conflict shows how elective wars ultimately fail (Mar 29, 2022)

(Didn't take Crimea and such into account, though.)

Going to be costly for Putin's Russia, ☢ rattling or not.

Edmund Adam writes:

Analysis: Ukraine war: The history of conflict shows how elective wars ultimately fail (Mar 29, 2022) — jorndoe

Uh... So all the Roman wars, Alexander the Great, the unification wars by Qin, they were all "necessary"?

I forget: Genghis Khan. Settler colonialism at the point of gun. Etc.

It's like this stuff follows a script. — StreetlightX

Indeed

It's like this stuff follows a script. — StreetlightX

Of course it does. It's the same old cold war script: invade country, bomb children, rape women and shoot prisoners, then deny deny deny, while the other side tries to make political hay of it.

If anyone can find a similar statement from His Holiness the Pope on the other parts of the world where the same rivers are flowing, please post it here. — FreeEmotion

It's part of his job description. He does so all the time.

Lol, no, I had in mind the part where the West enthusiastically supports a rapacious post-communist dictator in order to expand capitalist market-economies right up until the point where he gets too big for his britches, threatens that market-expansion, and has to be bombed and fought into submission at the expense of a massacre of local population while then denying any and all involvement, complicity, and support after the fact. And then supported in turn by a bunch of bootlickers who who think that politics is Harry Potter. Good to know that you didn't read the extract though.

You have a vivid imagination, I grant you that.

Funny that you call history imagination. Though I suppose you have to given that Ukraine's history began exactly two months ago for you and no further back.

You should write for Disney.

It's not dismissed but also not relevant as to when Putin annexed Crimea. Those elections were afterwards and the damage of fraternising with nationalist and neo-Nazis was already done; there was genuine worry in Crimea as Russians weren't Ukrainians in the eyes of the nationalist. — Benkei

Also there were the language laws, which actually were raised by other neighboring countries as Ukraine has a vast amount of different ethnic minorities, not only Russians. As mentioned earlier, the role of the right-wing parties in the later stages of the Maidan revolution is obvious as a) they were organized and were a parliamentary party (the Right sector) and b) obviously militant extremists are at home in riots. Yet to dismiss or to forget that the neo-nazis lost later in elections is wrong. Claiming that the present administration has ties to neo-nazis cannot be done just by referring to articles from 2014.

And this just underlines how spectacular success the first invasion of Ukraine was for Putin.

And in a sense, there's still a Nazi problem; it doesn't seem like a good idea to arm them even if they like to position themselves as a "Christian taliban" to fight against the Russian invaders. — Benkei

The extreme right exists just as the extreme left. If Ukraine has a nazi problem, then a many countries have a similar problem and we should put the issue in it's true context. I think that there is a genuine need for this discussion in general, but it shouldn't be used as the way to attack the present Ukrainian adminstration as Putin's talk of neonazis and drug addicts running Ukraine and the need for "denazification" is simply delusional propaganda only intended to keep his own people from realizing the reality of the conflict.

The US is run by oligarchs as well — Benkei

Yeah, but it isn't so bad as in Russia ...or Ukraine. At least in Ukraine they openly admit and understand the problem. Zelensky's election victory just shows how desperately Ukrainians want a change to the system.

In the US... well, Amazon just got it's first trade union! Quite important when the corporation has more or less 1 million workers (that cannot be replaced by robots in China) and a loss for one important American oligarch.

A team of Amazon workers has forced the technology giant to recognise a trade union in the US for the first time. Workers at a New York warehouse voted 55% in favour of joining the Amazon Labor Union. The group is led by former Amazon worker Chris Smalls, who made his name protesting against safety conditions at the retail giant during the pandemic. Mr Smalls' victory marks a major defeat for Amazon, which had fiercely fought against unionisation.

which is why it's so important Europe becomes a real alternative with multi-party representation instead of an effective lapdog for US foreign policy. — Benkei

Well, likely we will make our application to join that club, who some see as a lapdog for US foreign policy and others as a real Trans-Atlantic security organization. The application process is rumored to start at the 14th day of this month. Likely we will be in NATO along with you in the end of this year. If things go as the Finnish leadership has planned.

These events btw resulted in an denial-of-service attack towards the Foreign Ministry and Defense Ministry. Their servers were down...for one hour. Didn't make much headlines news other than comments "this was expected".

From the article:

The lure of using brute force to achieve quick economic and geopolitical gains has created a rolling tide of military mobilization that has carried countries into battle.

History often repeats itself in that those battles trigger the downfall of the stronger party who unnecessarily drew the first blood.

Now if with using that brute force one has indeed achieved gains in the past (second Chechen war, Russo-Georgian war, the annexation of Crimea), it's understandable one can make then disastrous choices and think everything will go as smoothly as before. Naysayers are alarmist idiots. You don't stop once you've got going.

Perfect example is one dictator who after incredible success with earlier military operations like Fall Weiss, Operation Weserübung and Fall Gelb, went on to more grand plans. So why not conquer the Soviet Union in 100 days with Operation Barbarossa? It sounds so reasonable and achievable.

Can stories defeat Putin?
Op-ed by Jo Nesbø, Le Monde, April 7, 2022

Vladimir Putin’s narrative that Russia invaded Ukraine to save a repressed people from 'a gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis' has gone down well, in Russia. Is this the real battlefield, the narrative? And what role can fiction play when the truth has fallen?

[...] in an era in which the truth has been devalued by fake news and propaganda, where powerful leaders are elected on a wave of emotion rather than their merits or political viewpoints, facts no longer carry the same weight they once did.

Facts have had to give way to stories that appeal to our emotions, stories about us and what defines us as a group, a nation, a culture, a religion. Perhaps it wasn’t a lack of weapons or military power that lost the wars of occupation in Vietnam and Afghanistan, perhaps it was a lack of stories that could “win people’s hearts and minds”. Or, more accurately: perhaps it was because the opposition had better stories.

"The first casualty of war is truth," said California Senator Hiram Johnson in 1917 - and it's one of the most often mentioned quotes about the current war in Ukraine. A quote used, among other things, to remind journalists how vulnerable fact-based truth is when two sides are fighting to impose their own version of events. But it also reminds us how naive it is to believe that a journalist - no matter how honest and independent - can separate his work from his own culture, nationality and inherited worldview, especially in times of war. [...]

In 1937, when the fascist general Franco bombed Guernica, massacring the civilian population, the whole city stood witness to what had happened. As soon as images of the destruction and the victims began to circulate, Franco and his generals, understanding the stir this would cause in Spain and abroad, insisted that the Republican population of Guernica had destroyed their city themselves.

For a long time, this version of events was believed -- at least by those who wanted to believe it. But the Republicans had a better storyteller on their side: Pablo Picasso countered with one of his most famous paintings, Guernica, which depicts hell falling on the small Basque town. Painted in Paris in 1937, this work is a non-objective representation of events, the product of an artist's imagination and experience, but it helped open the eyes of Europe. It was exhibited in Paris the same year, and then all over the continent, inspiring volunteers to go and fight alongside the Spanish Republicans.

If Guernica is both a work of propaganda and a masterpiece, so is Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin [1925], commissioned by the Soviet authorities to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 revolution. While both works speak of real events, they also take great artistic liberties - the famous scene of the massacre on the monumental staircase in Odessa, for example, never actually took place.

But a fiction writer need not worry about such details. His goal is to tell something true, but not necessarily something factually true. To touch hearts and minds - not to report the number of deaths, who did what to whom, when and where. This freedom is what gives fiction its power, especially when we, the audience, are not aware that we are dealing with propaganda.

Tanner Mirrlees, a professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, is the author of Hearts and Mines: The U.S. Empire's Culture Industry [2016]. In it, he explains how the U.S. Office of War Information created a division during World War II devoted exclusively to Hollywood, the Motion Picture Service. Between 1942 and 1945, the department reviewed 1,652 manuscripts, rewriting or deleting anything that portrayed the United States in an unfavorable light, including anything showing Americans as "indifferent or opposed to the war." [...]

Today, the whole world is sitting in the same theater watching the events unfolding in Ukraine. But what we are seeing are dubbed versions in each of our languages, which means that we are not all hearing the same story. There is a battle going on between the different versions of the story; the best one will triumph. Or, as the Norwegian film critic Mode Steinkjer writes in the daily Dagsavisen, "In war, the aim is not only to destroy this or that civilian or military target; it is just as much to win the hearts and minds of those parts of the world's population that are not directly involved in the conflict."

So the question is, what steps are we willing to take to win those hearts and minds, especially in a situation where a dictator like Vladimir Putin is playing by his own rules, deploying a kind of censorship and propaganda that we thought had been banned.

Is it desirable - or even proper - to play by Mr. Putin's rules? Isn't it contradictory for a democratic country to give up principles like freedom of speech and transparency, even if its goal is to temporarily protect these freedoms? Winston Churchill once said, "In time of war, truth is so precious that it must always be protected by a bulwark of lies." A pessimistic mind might add that in wartime lies are so precious that they must be protected by new lies, but the problem is that there will always be a new war or conflict somewhere to provide an excuse for new lies.

Optimists, including myself, can hope that the truth -- the imperfect, subjective truth of a journalist, artist, or any other story writer trying to express something true -- will win. We can hope that Abraham Lincoln was right when he said that "you can't fool all of the people all of the time" - in any case, the implosion of the Soviet Union or the ousting of Donald Trump from the White House point in that direction. Faced with the thousand and one versions of reality that we are served, we are not forced to give in and accept the idea that all versions are equally true. Some are truer than others.

We follow the day-to-day developments in military events, sanctions and diplomacy. But the war of stories is a long war. It is a war that Vladimir Putin will eventually lose, no matter how many bulwarks he surrounds his lies with. The only question is when.

Franco ruled Spain for almost forty years [from 1936 to 1975], with censorship among his main weapons of defense. But in the end, he was defeated in the history books; the Spanish people demolished his legacy and his ideas. Guernica was first exhibited in Spain in 1981, six years after Franco's death. In the space of just twelve months, the painting was seen by more than one million people, and today it remains one of the greatest attractions of the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. Because the truest stories - if not always the most factual - are the best.

https://www.corriere.it/economia/aziende/22_aprile_08/we-are-at-war-with-the-west-the-european-security-order-is-illegitimate-c6b9fa5a-b6b7-11ec-b39d-8a197cc9b19a.shtml


«We are at war with the West. The European security order is illegitimate»
Federico Fubini
16-21 minutes

«We are at war with the West. The European security order is illegitimate»

Sergey Karaganov has served as a presidential advisor in the Kremlin both under Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. He is still considered close to Russia’s president and foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. His recent proposals on Russian-speaking minorities in the “near abroad” are known as “Putin doctrine” and Professor Karaganov, who is honorary chair of the Moscow think tank the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, was first to come out publicly about an all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2019. President Putin has mentioned on Feb. 24 that Ukraine’s accession to NATO warrants Russia’s military intervention to prevent it. However, Ukraine didn’t even have a Membership Action Plan for NATO and Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz clearly stated accession was many, many years off.How can an attack be justified on such grounds?

For 25 years people like myself have said that NATO expansion would lead to war. Putin said several times that if it came to Ukraine becoming a member of NATO, there would be no Ukraine anymore. In Bucharest in 2008 there was a plan of quick accession of Ukraine and Georgia to NATO. It was blocked by the efforts of Germany and France, but since that time Ukraine has been integrated into NATO. It was pumped up by weaponry and its troops were trained by NATO, their army getting stronger and stronger day by day. In addition we saw a very rapid increase of neo-Nazi sentiment especially among the military, the society and the ruling elite. It was clear that Ukraine had become something like Germany around 1936-1937. The war was inevitable, they were a spearhead of NATO. We made the very hard decision to strike first, before the threat becomes deadlier.

But Ukraine was not about to become a member of NATO, not for at least many, many years. There was time to negotiate.

We have heard all kinds of promises by Western leaders throughout these 30 years. But they lied to us or they forgot about their promises. We were told at the beginning that NATO would not expand.

How can you think a non-nuclear medium-sized country like Ukraine would ever attack a nuclear giant like Russia? And how can you think this is a Nazi country with a Jewish president elected with over 70% of the votes? Ukraine was being built by the US and other NATO countries as a spearhead, maybe of aggression or at least of military pressure, to bring NATO’s military machine closer to the heart of Russia. We can see now how well their forces had been preparing for a war. And Nazis were not only about killing jews. Nazism is about supremacy of one nation over another. Nazism is humiliation of other nations. The regime and the society in Ukraine were going very much like Germany in the 1930s.

You say that NATO promised never to enlarge to the East and Russia was cheated on that. But former Warsaw Pact countries requested to be included in NATO themselves. And Russia signed up to the Founding Act on Russia-NATO relations in 1997, accepting NATO enlargement. No cheating there. It was the biggest mistake of Russia’s foreign policy in the last 30 years. I fought against it, because the Founding Act of 1997 legitimized further NATO expansion. But we signed it because we were desperately poor and we still were trusting in the wisdom of our partners. President Yeltsin probably thought that we would sneak between drops of rain, to no avail. As for NATO, it was formed as a defensive alliance. But when the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia was weak, I was shocked when I saw the rape of Serbia in 1999. Then we had an absolutely atrocious war in Iraq waged by most of the NATO members and then we had another clear-cut aggression in Libya, always by NATO. So we do not trust words. But we know that article 5 of NATO, stating that an attack on a NATO member is an attack to all, doesn’t work. There is no automatic guarantee that NATO would come to the defense of a member under attack. Please read article 5 of the Treaty. But this enlargement is an enlargement of the aggressive alliance. It’s cancer and we wanted to stop this metastasis. We have to do it by a surgical operation. I regret we were unable to prevent such an outcome.

We all agree the Iraq war was illegitimate and was a very serious mistake. Corriere della Sera came out against that war at the time. But one grave mistake doesn’t justify a second grave mistake. And the US people could elect a new leader, Obama, that was against the Iraq war and changed American policy. Can Russians have an opportunity to do the same? I don’t think that in the foreseeable future we will have any change of power in Russia, because we are fighting a war of survival. This is a war with the West and people are regrouping around their leader. This is an authoritarian country and the leadership is always very attentive to the moods of the people. But I don’t see real signs of opposition. Also, in the US or else nobody was really punished for the war in Iraq, so we have our doubts about the effectiveness of democracy.

Your parallels don’t seem to match. In Libya, Ghaddafi was bombing protest demonstrations from the sky. NATO enforced a no-fly zone that had been called for by a UN Security Council resolution and Russia did not veto it. Yes. At that time we believed the reassurances of our Western partners. But then we saw a clear-cut aggression devastating the country. That led us toward total distrust of Western countries, and especially of NATO.

As for the intervention in Yugoslavia in 1999, it was made to stop a war that led to over 10,000 deaths and a UN tribunal charged Milosevic for war crimes, deportation and crimes against humanity. The massive killings in former Yugoslavia happened after the NATO’s rape of Serbia. People were killed on all sides. It was a civil war. It was an unspeakable aggression. And the Milosevic trial was a sad and humiliating show by petty people trying to rationalize their previous mistakes if not crimes


It was a UN tribunal, not a EU tribunal.
We don’t acknowledge the right of that tribunal.

You said that the real war now is against Western expansion. What do you mean? We saw Western expansion happening, we see Russophobia in the West reaching levels like antisemitism between the world wars. So war was already becoming likely. And we saw deep divisions and structural problems within Western societies, so we believed that anyway a war was more and more likely. So the Kremlin decided to strike first. Also, this military operation will be used to restructure Russian elite and Russian society. It will become a more militant-based and national-based society, pushing out non-patriotic elements from the elite.

The bottom line question is: Mussolini did not recognize the international order that emerged from the Versailles Treaty in 1919. Does the Kremlin recognize the legitimacy of the European order that emerged from the fall of the Berlin Wall? Do you think this order is legitimate?
We should not recognize the order that was built against Russia. We tried to integrate in it but we saw it was a Versailles system number 2. I wrote that we had to destroy it. Not by force, but through constructive destruction, through refusal to participate in it. But after the last demand to stop NATO was again rejected, it was decided to use force.

So the overall goal of this war is to overturn the presence of NATO in central and eastern European countries? We see that most of the institutions are, in our view, one-sided and illegitimate. They are threatening Russia and Eastern Europe. We wanted fair peace, but the greed and stupidity of the Americans and the short-sightedness of the Europeans revealed they didn’t want that. We have to correct their mistakes.

Is the EU part of the institutions that Russia feels are illegitimate? No, it’s legitimate. But sometimes we dislike EU policies, especially if they become more and more belligerent.
You seem to believe that an escalation of this war to other countries is inevitable. Is that what you are saying? Unfortunately it is becoming more and more likely. Americans and their NATO partners continue support of Ukraine by sending arms. If that continues, it is obvious that targets in Europe could or will be hit in order to stop lines of communications. Then the war could escalate. At this juncture it is becoming more and more plausible. I think the Joint chiefs of staff of US armed forces are of the same opinion as I am.

Denazification is what Ukraine seems to have proven by electing a Jewish president. Demilitarization is the opposite of what Mr. Putin has achieved, as this attack led Ukraine to get heavy weaponry from the West. Plus, Germany and the EU are rearming too, NATO has moved troops closer to Russia’s borders, Western sanctions are now much tighter, while Europe and the US got closer together and Russia is becoming financially isolated. Would you say Putin’s military operation is proving a success, so far?
Nazism is not only about antisemitism. It is about hating and suppressing all other nationalities. And it was taking over Ukraine. We never know how the military operations end. Demilitarization means destruction of Ukrainian military forces - that is happening and will accelerate. Of course, if Ukraine is supported with new weapons, that could prolong the agony. We can only talk about “victory” in quotes, because there are many casualties on both the Russian and the Ukrainian side. The war will be victorious, in one way or another. I assume demilitarization will be achieved and there will be denazification, too. Like we did in Germany and in Chechnya. Ukrainians will become much more peaceful and friendly to us.

But so far the Russian military had to withdraw after keeping Kiev under siege for one month. It doesn’t look like the military operation is going so well, does it? It’s a large military operation, so it has secrets in the way it’s waged. What if the Kiev operation was meant to distract Ukrainian forces and keep them away from the main theater in the South and South-East? Maybe that was the plan. Moreover Russian troops have been very careful not to hit civilian targets, we used only 30-35% of the lethal weapons that we could use. If we had used everything, that would have meant the destruction of Ukrainian cities and a much quicker victory. We did not do carpet bombing like Americans in Iraq. The endgame probably will be a new treaty, maybe with Zelensky still there. Probably it would mean the creation of a country in South and South-East Ukraine that is friendly to Russia. Maybe there will be several Ukraines. But at this juncture it is impossible to predict because, of course, it’s an open-ended story. We are in the fog of war.
There is clear evidence that civilians have been targeted and killed by the Russian in Mariupol, in Bucha and elsewhere. These look very much like war crimes and crimes against humanity and they were deliberate. Should they be persecuted?
The Bucha story is completely fake-staged, it’s a provocation.

It doesn’t look staged at all.
I watched the pictures and I am 99% sure. But more in general there is a war and civilians suffer. We know that Ukrainian neoNazi forces have been using civilians as living shields, especially in Mariupol. We have different pictures with you.

It’s rather the opposite: the Russian army did not allow humanitarian corridors. We opened them. They were blocked by nationalist forces. I know how our military operates but, of course, this is a war. We face a tragedy.

Did you expect this level of cohesion between Europe and the US? Well, the cohesion will collapse because of the problems of the West. But for the time being they were organizing even before this conflict. The West is failing and losing its position in the world, so it needs an enemy – for the moment we are the enemy. I don’t think the unity will last, Europe will not commit the suicide by choosing to lose its independence. I hope our European neighbors will recuperate from this dizziness of hatred.

You speak like some other country started this war, in fact Russia started it. I was not for this particular scenario, but it happened. And I support my country. The West committed several aggressions. We are now on the same moral level, we are equal, we are doing more or less like you. I regret that we lost our moral superiority. But we are fighting an existential war

Sanctions are getting tighter. Will Russia become more dependent on China? There is no question about that: we will be more integrated and more dependent on China. It has positive elements but overall we will be much more dependent. I am not very much afraid of becoming a pawn of China like some EU states became pawns of the US. First, Russians have a core gene of sovereignty. Second, we are culturally different from the Chinese, I don’t think that China could or would like to overtake us. However we are not happy with the situation, because I would have preferred to have better relations with Europe. But Chinese are our close allies and friends and the biggest source of Russian strength after Russian people themselves. We are a source of their strength. I would prefer to end this confrontation with Europe. My calculation was to create a safe Western flank to compete more effectively In the Asian world of tomorrow

You declared that China, not Russia, will emerge as the victor in this war. What did you mean? We will be victorious because Russians always are in the end. But in the meantime we will lose a lot. We will lose people. We will lose financial resources and we will become poorer for the time being. But we are ready to sacrifice in order to build a more viable and fair international system. We are talking about Ukraine, but we really want to build a different international system than the one that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union and, in turn, is now collapsing. We all are sinking into chaos now. We would like to build Fortress Russia to defend ourselves from this chaos, even if we are getting poorer for this. Unfortunately the chaos could take over Europe, if Europe doesn’t act according to its interests. What Europe is doing right now is absolutely suicidal.

Is that a threat? Don’t you think nuclear deterrence still applies? I know that officially under certain circumstances the US could use nuclear weapons for the defense of Europe and they allegedly could fight for the defense of Europe against a nuclear superpower. There is a 1% chance this might happen, so we have to be careful. But if a n American president takes such a decision inviting devastating response it would mean he is insane.

This war doesn’t look sustainable, including for Russia. It can’t go on for long. What are the elements to agree at least on a real ceasefire? First, Ukraine must be a completely demilitarized neutral country – no heavy arms, for whatever of Ukraine remains. This should be guaranteed by outside powers, including Russia, and no military exercises should take place in the country if one of the guarantors is against it. Ukraine should be a peaceful buffer, hopefully sending back some of the arms systems deployed in recent years.

Ukraine needs security guarantees, it needs to be able to defend itself or it will not be a sovereign country anymore.
I am sorry but Italy and most European countries cannot defend themselves either.

They belong to NATO…
They have been saving on security. That is how they got themselves into this awkward position that Europe is not considered to be a serious actor in the world. Switzerland and Austria are neutral, but are safe. So can Ukraine.

Do you realize that after what you just said, the debate in Italy will move towards investing more on defense? You are welcome. One of the grave mistakes of the Europeans in the last decades is that they didn’t invest in their security, under their ideal of eternal peace. But I think European nations should be able to defend themselves, because they have real threats coming from the South and the world is becoming a very dangerous place as international relations are collapsing. The question is more against whom Italy would like to arm. Against Russia? Well, that would be insane. But you need a more robust military force. You are living in a very dangerous place in the world. If you depend on America, you are selling out your own security and sovereignty because the Americans have their own interests.

The EU seems to be moving towards cutting dependence from Russian energy – first coal, then oil and finally natural gas. Did you expect that? I hope you are not suicidal. Of course that would damage Russia, too, but Europe would undermine its economy and its social situation. I hope it will not happen, because you can calculate your own interests. If you don’t want our coal, we will sell it somewhere else. If you don’t want our oil, after a time and some losses, we will sell it elsewhere. And if you don’t want gas, well, well, we can also eventually redirect it after some suffering. Russians support Putin at 81% now, people are ready for a rough period.

Do you think Italy and Europe could do something to broker a deal? Not easy, given the situation. But what they could do is try to stop this Russophobia, akin anti-semitism of the previous centuries, this satanization of Russia that would lead us eventually to a worse confrontation than we have now. Even Russian culture is being erased in Europe by a new cancel culture.

So the question is, what steps are we willing to take to win those hearts and minds, especially in a situation where a dictator like Vladimir Putin is playing by his own rules, deploying a kind of censorship and propaganda that we thought had been banned. — Olivier5

This reality has been something that Russians do know well. There is things they say and have to say publicly, and then there is the totally different realm they can say in their kitchen when with people they trust. Hence there are several words for truth in Russian, just as there are for falsehood.

So for us who don't speak Russian and aren't in Russia, perhaps it our side that ought to be our focus.

Perhaps to show, just like you did in your comment and the example of Guernica, just how frail the truth is until history is written and the events have past. That people believed that the bombing of Guernica were "fake news" or Republican propaganda is telling. Before the war, ideas that Hitler was just correcting the injustices of the peace terms dictated after WW1 were quite popular. Only a small fraction of people in other countries enthusiastically supported Nazism.

And of course there was the dismissal of what actually Hitler was saying and what he had written in "Mein Kampf" as simply rhetoric intended for the German population. Or ignorance about it. You can notice it some rhetoric from the 1930's. That mr Hitler has done wonders with fighting unemployment. That there was this feeling of a new Germany. So some people were "understanding" Hitler, not totally adhering to the ideology. Surely leaders are reasonable when it comes to realpolitik, surely?

You know we can just follow the link, right? You don't need to copy-paste the entire thing here.

Yes, this looks like a typical presentation of the official stance, geared more towards the foreign reader.

If you want to see something even more candid and unrestrained, read this article that was published about a week ago by the Russian state news agency RIA: What Russia Should Do with Ukraine (offsite English translation). It is a true fascist manifesto.

↪neomac
You know we can just follow the link, right? You don't need to copy-paste the entire thing here. — SophistiCat

The second time I checked, the article was behind a paywall, so I just wanted to spare you all the hassle.

If you want to see something even more candid and unrestrained, read this article that was published about a week ago by the Russian state news agency RIA: What Russia Should Do with Ukraine (offsite English translation). It is a true fascist manifesto. — SophistiCat

Thanks for the link!

Thanks for the article, which contains something of a plan. To be sure, de-Nazification is curious term to me, I do not fear Nazis, I find these ultra-nationalists an amusing sideshow to the main political elements in many countries, including the United States. I think they are more or less harmless. I could be wrong.
In any case, it is difficult to see President Putin risking everything to ban Nazi fan groups. Do they wield power? I may never know.

The author has some measure of true journalism in him to address the results of the war realistically:

It is impossible to foresee in advance exactly in which territories such a mass of the population will constitute a critically needed majority. The “Catholic province” (Western Ukraine as part of five regions) is unlikely to become part of the pro-Russian territories. The line of alienation, however, will be found empirically. It will remain hostile to Russia, but forcibly neutral and demilitarized Ukraine with formally banned Nazism. The haters of Russia will go there. The threat of an immediate continuation of the military operation in case of non-compliance with the listed requirements will be the the guarantee of the preservation of this residual Ukraine in a neutral state. Perhaps this will require a permanent Russian military presence on its territory.

The second time I checked, it was behind a paywall, so I just wanted to spare you the hassle. — neomac

Ah I see, for some reason I was able to see it - perhaps because I use NoScript.

You can notice it some rhetoric from the 1930's. That mr Hitler has done wonders with fighting unemployment. That there was this feeling of a new Germany. So some people were "understanding" Hitler, not totally adhering to the ideology. Surely leaders are reasonable when it comes to realpolitik, surely? — ssu

"Surely, and Mr Hitler is fighting communism. That must count for something."

Often they would have the good sense to qualify their support: "I find him a bit intolerant, though."

I live in arguably one of the best establishments of this kind of system and it ranks us very high on indexes of life quality and freedom. — Christoffer

And other countries in other parts of the world have to pay the price for your life quality and freedom.

Like those poor South American countries that produce the lithium for your precious electric cars. Those countries are destroying their own land and their own people with dirty industry so that you can be "high on indexes of life quality and freedom".

I'll be impressed with Sweden once it's self-sufficient and once its happiness and wellbeing don't depend on the misery of others.

Everyone has a right to exist. — FreeEmotion

Some people need to be put down for what they do.